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James Salter, The Art of Fiction No. 133

Interviewed by Edward Hirsch

Issue 127, Summer 1993

James Salter is a consummate storyteller. His manners are precise and elegant; he has a splendid New York accent; he runs his hands through his gray hair and laughs boyishly. At sixty-seven he has the fitness of an ex-military man. He tells anecdotes easily, dramatically, but he also carries an aura of reserve about him. There is a privacy one doesn’t breach.

Salter was born in 1925 and raised in New York City. He graduated from West Point in 1945 and was commissioned in the U.S. Army Air Force as a pilot. He served for twelve years in the Pacific, the United States, Europe, and Korea, where he flew over one hundred combat missions as a fighter pilot. He resigned from the Air Force after his first novel came out in 1957, and settled in Grandview on the Hudson, just north of New York City. He has earned his living as a writer ever since. He has three grown children, a son and two daughters, by a previous marriage. He lives with the writer Kay Eldredge and their eight-year-old son, Theo. They divide their time between Aspen, Colorado and Bridgehampton, Long Island.

Salter has published five novels: The Hunters (1957), The Arm of Flesh (1961), A Sport and a Pastime (1967), Light Years (1975), and Solo Faces (1979). He received an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1982. Five of his stories have appeared in O. Henry collections and one in the Best American Short Stories. His collection Dusk & Other Stories (1988) received the PEN/Faulkner Award.

It rained continuously during the four days I visited Bridgehampton in August of 1992, but I scarcely noticed the weather, so content was I to sit at the dining room table asking questions and listening to Salter’s carefully considered answers. Even on gray days the traditional, cedar-shingled two-floor house with its many French doors and windows seemed bathed in light. We drank ice tea by day, and one exquisitely made martini each night (Salter at one point estimated that he has had eighty-seven hundred martinis in his life). Afterward, company came for dinner; many bottles of wine were consumed; the interviewer wandered off to examine the framed menus on the wall, the etching of two bathers by André de Segonzac, the miniature painting by Sheridan Lord of the landscape near the house.

Salter writes in a study on the second floor, a small, airy room with a peaked ceiling and a half-moon window. His desk is a large wooden country-trestle table made of old pine. Everywhere there are telltale signs of the memoir he has been working on for the past years—envelopes that have been scrawled on, scraps of paper that have been entirely covered with his minute handwriting. On the morning that I was left alone in the study I found well-thumbed copies of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa resting on a map of France with places circled and marked. I discovered an aeronautical chart, a sheaf of twelve extremely detailed pages of notes in red, blue, and black ink, a journal from 1955 with the sentence written across the front: “Every year seems the most terrible.” On the small wooden table next to the desk lay a group of cahiers, little soft-covered gray-numbered notebooks, each containing a possible chapter of the memoir. These homemade workbooks are dense with notes—the author’s instructions to himself, quotations from other writers, entries that have been color-coded for the place where they might be used. “Life passes into pages if it passes into anything,” Salter has written, and to read through these notes is to reconfirm what one knew all along: how meticulously each of his pages is written, how scrupulously each of his chapters constructed. Everything is checked and rechecked, written and revised and then revised again until the prose shimmers, radiant and indestructible.

Coming down the stairs past the photograph of Isaac Babel I grew once more wildly excited about Salter’s work-in-progress. He demurs: “Hope but not enthusiasm is the proper state for the writer.”

INTERVIEWER

How do you actually write?

JAMES SALTER

I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of writing. Then I sit down and type. And then I retype, correct, retype, and keep going until it’s finished. It’s been demonstrated to me many times that there is some inefficiency in this, but I find that the ease of moving a paragraph is not really what I need. I need the opportunity to write this sentence again, to say it to myself again, to look at the paragraph once more, and actually to go through the whole text, line by line, very carefully, writing it out. There may be even some kind of mimetic impulse here where I am trying to write like myself, so to speak.

INTERVIEWER

So it is crucially a process of revision?

SALTER

I hate the first inexact, inadequate expression of things. The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.

INTERVIEWER

Do you revise as you go?

SALTER

It depends, but normally, no. I write big sections and then let them sit. It’s dangerous not to let things age, and if something is really good, you should put it away for a month.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think of the sentence or the paragraph as an organizing unit?

SALTER

Normally I just go a sentence at a time. I find the most difficult part of writing is to get it down initially because what you have written is usually so terrible that it’s disheartening, you don’t want to go on. That’s what I think is hard—the discouragement that comes from seeing what you have done. This is all you could manage?

INTERVIEWER

You give a lot of attention to the weight and character of individual words.

SALTER

I’m a frotteur, someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader’s hair frizzy. There’s a question of pacing. You want short sentences and long sentences—well, every writer knows that. You have to develop a certain ease of delivery and make your writing agreeable to read.

INTERVIEWER

I find your prose style wholly distinctive, beautiful and implacable. How did you hit upon it?

SALTER

I like to write. I’m moved by writing. One can’t analyze it beyond that.

INTERVIEWER

Do you write every day?

SALTER

No, I’m incapable of that for various reasons. It’s either because of the press of affairs or I just haven’t brought myself to a position where I’m ready to write anything down.